“The modem method is quite different,” she went on. “We make use of the fact that ice can exist in many different solid forms. Ice is complicated stuff, much more than most people realize. If you raise the pressure to three thousand atmospheres, then drop the temperature, water will remain liquid to about minus twenty degrees Celsius. And when it finally changes to a solid, it isn’t the familiar form of ice—what is usually called Phase I. Instead it turns to something called Phase III. Drop the temperature from there, holding the pressure constant, and at about minus twenty-five degrees it changes to another form, Phase II. And it stays that way as you drop the temperature still farther. If you go to five thousand atmospheres pressure—that’s what we are doing here—before you drop the temperature, water freezes at about minus five degrees and adopts still another form, Phase V. The trick to avoiding cell rupture problems at freezing point is to inject anticrystalloids, which help to inhibit crystal formation, then by the right combination of temperatures and pressures work all the way down toward absolute zero, passing into and through Phases V, III, and II.

  “That’s what we are doing now. But don’t expect to see much except dial readings. For obvious reasons, the pressure chamber is made without seams and without observation ports. You don’t get pressures of five thousand atmospheres, not even in the deepest ocean gulfs. Fortunately, once you have the temperature down below a hundred degrees absolute, you can reduce the pressure to one atmosphere—otherwise the storage of Revivables would be quite impracticable. As it is, we have three-quarters of a million stacked away in the Second Chance wombs. Every one of them is neatly labeled and waiting for the resurrection. As soon as someone figures out how.”

  She glanced at Drake, aware that her last comment might have been the wrong thing to say. The official position at Second Chance was that everyone was revivable, and in due course everyone would be revived.

  Drake nodded without expression. He had researched the whole subject in detail, and nothing that she had said so far was news. In his opinion it would be as hard to revivify the early cryocorpses as it would be to get Tutankhamen’s mummy up and moving again. They had been frozen with the wrong procedure, and they were being stored at too high a temperature.

  But who was he to make that decision? They had paid their deposits, and they had the right to sit there in the wombs until their rentals ran out. He had started Ana with a forty-year contract, but he thought of that as probably just the beginning.

  He had brought with him a copy of Ana’s medical records. He added to it a full description of everything that he had seen in the past hour or two, copied the whole document, and made sure that a complete set was included with the file records on Ana. When Ana’s body was finally taken away for storage, he went back to the house, fell into bed, and slept like a cryocorpse himself for sixteen hours.

  It was time to drop the other shoe.

  When Drake was fully awake again, fed and bathed, he called Tom Lambert and asked to see him at his home rather than his office. He accepted a hefty drink that Tom prepared, after one look at him, for “medicinal purposes,” and laid out his plans.

  After he was finished Tom walked over to his chair, poked the muscles in his shoulders and the back of his neck, pulled down his lower eyelid and stared at the exposed skin, and finally went to sit opposite him.

  “You’ve been under a monstrous strain this past few months,” he said quietly.

  “Very true. I have.” Drake kept his voice just as calm.

  “And it would be quite unnatural for your behavior or feelings to be completely normal. In fact, if you seem normal now it’s only because you have completely walled in your true feelings. And you certainly don’t understand the implications of what you are proposing to me.”

  Drake shook his head. “This isn’t new. It’s only new to you. I’ve been thinking of this since the day we had the first suggestion of a terminal diagnosis.”

  “Then that was the day you put the lid on your true feelings.” Tom Lambert leaned forward. “Look, Drake, Anastasia was a wonderful woman, a unique woman. I won’t say I know what you have been through, because I don’t, but I have at least some idea of your sense of loss. But you have to ask yourself what Ana would want you to do now.

  You can’t let the sad past become your obsession. She would tell you that you still have a life of your own, and even without her you have to live it. She would want you to live it, because she loved you. Let me make a suggestion . . .”

  While Tom was talking, Drake had found it harder and harder to listen. The room felt dull and airless and he had trouble breathing. Tom Lambert’s words came from far off. They didn’t seem to say anything. He forced himself to concentrate, to listen harder.

  “. . . of your work. You are still a young man. Forty to fifty good years ahead of you. And already you have a reputation. You are one of this country’s most promising composers and your best works still lie ahead. Ana may have performed your work better than anyone else, but there will be others. They will learn. With your talent you owe it to the rest of us not to cut your career off before it reaches its peak.”

  “I have no intention of doing so. I will compose again. Later.”

  “You mean, later after that?” Tom was frowning and shaking his head. “Suppose there is no later? Drake, take my advice as both your doctor and your friend. You desperately need to get out of this house, and you need to take a vacation. Go off on a cruise somewhere, take a trip around the world. Expose yourself to some new influences. I know how you must feel now, but you should give it a year and see how you feel then. I guarantee you, everything will seem different. You’ll want to live again. You’ll give up this mad idea.”

  The breathless feeling was fading. Drake again had control of himself. He waited patiently until Tom Lambert was finished, then nodded agreement.

  “I’ll do as you say, Tom. I’ll get away from here for a while. But if you are wrong—if I come back to you, in, say, eight or ten years, and I ask you again, will you do it? Will you help me? I want you to give me an honest answer, and I want your word on it.”

  The tension drained visibly from Tom Lambert. He snorted in relief. “Ten years from now? Drake, if you come back to me in eight or ten years and and ask me again, I’ll admit I was completely wrong. And I promise you, I’ll help you to do what you’ve asked.”

  “An absolute promise? I don’t want to hear someday that you changed your mind, or didn’t mean what you said.”

  “An absolute promise, sure I’ll give you that.” Tom laughed. “But I’m not worried that I’ll ever be called on it. I’ll bet you everything I own that after a year or two have gone by, you’ll never mention that promise again.” He walked over to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. “I’d like to propose a toast, Drake. Or actually, three toasts. To us, to your future, and to your next and greatest composition.”

  Drake raised his glass in return. “I can only drink to part of that, Tom. Here’s to us, and here’s to the future. But I can’t drink to my next work, because I don’t know when I’ll create it. I have lots of things to do—for one thing, you told me to get out of town. I’m going to do that right away. But don’t worry, I’ll be in touch.”

  It was a half truth. Drake would not leave until certain other plans were more firmly fixed. But he certainly expected to be in touch with Tom Lambert when the time came.

  There were two problems. One was simple and well defined: money. Drake needed enough to make sure that Ana could remain safe within the icy womb for the indefinite future, until she could be safely thawed and her disease could be cured. Then her life would begin again. There were a few things he obviously couldn’t guard against, such as a total collapse of the world to barbarism, or the rejection of all present forms of currencies and commodities. Those were risks that Ana—and he— would have to accept.

  The other problem was more subtle. According to Tom it might be a long time before a cure was found for Ana’s rare and highly malignant disease. As he pointed out, something that killed only a few people a year did not get the attention of common cancers and heart diseases, which killed hundreds of millions.

  Suppose that a cure was not discovered for a century, or even for two centuries. What knowledge of present-day society would interest people in the year 2200? What should a man know or a woman be, for the inhabitants of that future Earth to think it worthwhile to revive them? Drake was convinced that even when a foolproof way of resuscitating the Revivables was discovered, most of the unfortunates in the wombs would remain exactly where they were. The contracts with Second Chance provided only for maintenance in a cryonic condition. They did not, and could not, offer a guarantee that an individual would be thawed.

  Why thaw anyone at all? Why add another to a crowded world, unless he or she had something special to offer?

  Drake imagined himself back in the early nineteenth century. What could he have placed into his brain, then, that would be considered valuable today, two hundred years later? Not politics, or art. Knowledge of them was quite adequate. Certainly not science, or any technology— progress in the last two centuries had been phenomenal.

  He had plenty of time to consider the question; time, which had been denied to Ana. It would be foolish to hurry, when he could plan and calculate at his leisure. He had set a goal of ten years, which would still allow forty of the shared fifty that he had looked for and longed for. But he was quite willing to stretch that by a couple of years.

  If it did take more time, it would not be because he was distracted with other activities. While he worked and pondered, his only diversion was to estimate the probabilities that everything would work out as he hoped. Always, the odds came out depressingly low.

  While he was trying to decide what he needed to learn, he was hard at work on the first problem: making money. He deliberately turned his back on compositions that broke new ground and offered new challenges. Instead he took commissions, wrote commemorative pieces, gave concerts, made recordings, and produced reams of music for good, bad, and indifferent shows and movies. If anyone thought that he was debasing his art and cashing in on his reputation, they were too polite to comment on it. His own attitude was simple: if it was lucrative, it was acceptable.

  Occasionally it was also unpleasant, grinding toil. But sometimes, oddly enough, the commercial challenges seemed to bring out the best in him. The finest melody he had ever conceived provided the theme music to a successful television show. And after four years he had an even bigger stroke of luck.

  He had written a set of short pieces a couple of years after he and Ana first met, as a kind of musical joke designed especially to appeal to her. They were baroque forms, with baroque period harmonies, but he had added occasional modem harmonic twists, piquancy inserted where it would be most surprising and most appealing.

  They had been quite successful, although only among a limited audience. Now, given a commission to provide the incidental music for a series of television dramas on life in eighteenth-century France, and facing an impossible deadline, he returned to cannibalize and adapt his own earlier work. The dramas turned out to be the hit of the decade, with his music credited as a big part of the reason for their success. Suddenly his minuets, bourrees, gavottes, sarabandes, and rondeaux were everywhere. And as they flooded from the audio outlets, the royalties flooded in from every country around the globe.

  Drake went on working as hard as ever, but as soon as he could he established a foundation and trust fund. It guaranteed continued care for Ana’s cryocorpse for many centuries, no matter what happened to Drake himself.

  Freed from a need for money, his work vectors changed direction. Instead of regular composition he became feverishly busy soaking up all that he could learn of the private and personal liver of his musical contemporaries. He interviewed, entertained, courted, and analyzed them, and he wrote about them extensively. But never quite in full. In every piece he was careful to leave a hanging tail—a hint, that said, “there is much more to say and I know what it is; but for the moment I am deliberately leaving it unsaid.”

  What would the people of the future most want to know about their ancestors? Drake had his own answer. Their fascination would not be with the formal works, the official biographies, the textbook knowledge. They would have more than enough of those. What they would want would be the personal details, the chat, the gossip. They would want the equivalent of Boswell’s journals and of Samuel Pepys’s diaries. And if there was a way that they could have not only the written legacy, but the recorder himself, to talk to him and ask more questions . . .

  It was not work that could be hurried. But finally, after nine long years, Drake was as ready as he would ever be. There was always the temptation to add one more interview, write one more article.

  He resisted, and briefly worried a different question. How would he earn a living in the future? It might be only twenty years, but it might be fifty, two hundred, or a thousand. Could Beethoven, suddenly transported to the year 2000, have earned a living as a musician?

  More realistically, how would Spohr, or Hummel, or some other of Beethoven’s less famous contemporaries have fared? Drake was betting that they, and he, could manage very well as soon as they had picked up the tricks of the time. Better, probably, than the far greater genius, the titan of Bonn. They were more facile, more flexible, more politically astute.

  And if he was wrong, and there was no way that he could make a living from his music? Then he would do the twenty-third-century equivalent of washing dishes for a living. That was the least of his worries.

  One day he stopped everything, put his affairs in order, and returned home. Without notice he headed for Tom Lambert’s house. They had kept in touch, and he knew that Tom had married and was busy raising a family in the same house that he had lived in all his life. But it was still a surprise to walk along that quiet tree-lined street, look over the same untidy privet hedge, and see Tom in the front yard playing baseball with a stranger, an eight-year-old boy who wore a flaming new version of Tom’s greying red mop.

  “Drake! My God, why didn’t you call and tell me you were in town? How do you do it, you’re as thin as ever.” Tom had lost some of his hair, but added a paunch to make up for it. He ushered Drake into his house and fussed over him like the Prodigal Son, leading the way into the familiar study. While his wife went into the kitchen to kill the fatted calf, he stood and beamed at Drake with pride and pleasure.

  “We hear your music everywhere, you know,” he said. “It’s absolutely wonderful to know that your career is going so well.”

  Judged by Drake’s own standards, it was not. He knew that he had done no first-rate composition in years. But Tom, like most people, was comfortable musically with what he found most familiar. From that point of view, and in terms of commercial success, Drake was riding high.

  He itched to get down to business right away, but Tom’s three young boys hovered around the study and the living room, curious to see the famous visitor. Then came a family dinner, and liqueurs after it watching the sunset, with Drake in the guest-of-honor seat and Tom and his wife, Mary-Jane, doing most of the talking.

  At ten o’clock Mary-Jane disappeared to put the boys to bed. Drake was alone with Tom. At last. He took out the application and handed it to his friend without a word.

  As Tom looked at it and realized what it was, all the happiness faded from his face. He shook his head in disbelief.

  “I thought you put all this behind you years ago. What started it going again?”

  Drake stared at him without speaking, as though he had not understood the question.

  “Or maybe it never stopped,” Tom went on. “I should have guessed it hours ago. You used to be so full of life, so full of fun. Tonight I don’t think I saw you smile even once. When did you last take a vacation?”

  “You gave me your word, Tom. Your promise.”

  Lambert studied the other man’s thin face. “Never mind a vacation, when did you last take any sort of break from work? How long since you relaxed for an evening, or even for an hour? Not tonight, that’s for sure.”

  “I go out all the time, to concerts and to dinner parties.”

  “You do. And what do you do there? I bet you don’t relax. You interview people, and you take notes, and then you produce a stream of articles. You work. And you’ve been working, incessantly, year after year. How long since you’ve been with a woman?”

  Drake shook his head but did not speak.

  Tom sighed. “I’m sorry. Forget that I asked that, it was a dumb, insensitive thing to say. But you need to face a fact, Drake, and you shouldn’t try to hide from it: she’s dead. Do you hear me. Ana is dead. Work won’t change that. Nothing can bring her back to you. And you can’t go on forever with your own emotions chained and harnessed.”

  “You promised me, Tom. You gave me your solemn word that you would help me.”

  “Drake!”

  “Do you ever make promises to your children?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Do you keep them?”

  “Drake, you can’t use that argument, the situations are totally different. You act as though I made you some sort of solemn vow, but it wasn’t like that at all.”

  “Then how was it? Don’t bother to answer.” Drake took the little recorder out from his inside jacket pocket. “Listen.”

  The words were thin in tone, but quite clear.

  . . . if I come back to you, in, say, eight or ten years, and I ask you again, will you do it? Will you help me? I want you to give me an honest answer, and I want your word on it.

  Ten years from now? Drake, if you come back to me in eight or ten years and ask me again, I’ll admit I was completely wrong. And I promise you, I’ll help you to do what you’ve asked.

  An absolute promise? I don’t want to hear someday that you changed your mind, or didn’t mean what you said.

  An absolute promise, sure I’ll give you that . . . There was the sound of Tom’s relieved laugh.